Am I being ripped off?

FatPope

Hi,

I've recently got a new BT broadband connection which is reputed to be 7.5Mb. The max I've ever got out of it seems to be around 4.3Mb however, which seems to be far short of this amount. The settings on the router itself display the line rate at 5120 Kbps with a noise rate of 10.8dB and a line attenuation of 42 dB. Am I right in assuming I'm just getting a 5Mb connection therefore? I've complained about this numerous times to BT but they just keep saying that the overall speed depends on many factors, distance to the exchange, etc.

I'm about 1km from the exchange, maybe less. As far as I'm aware though the line speed listed is the max speed of the connection before attenuation by all these factors, am I correct?

Simi

Upon entering your stats into this handy little tool here you'll find that you are indeed getting the best possible speed with those stats. http://www2.farina1.com/ADSL/default.aspx

If you are indeed less than 1km from the exchange you should try plugging the modem into the main phone socked of the house plugging out all other attached devices, phones, sky box etc. and see if your stats improve.

If they do, then you can improve your speed. If not, then this is probably the best your going to get. And no you're not being ripped off. 5mbps is pretty damn good on adsl1.

ArseBurger

What type of router is it?

On a number of types of router the stated line speed is informational only and represents a figure used in calculating statistics.

An attenuation of 42 dB would suggest that you're much farther than 1km from the exchange, unless there's a cabling problem somewhere. As mentioned already, try disconnecting any devices like phones or Sky boxes. However, your line is connecting at exactly 5 Mbps down which would suggest that the exchange is limiting you anyway so it might not improve the connection speed even if your stats do improve.

TheDeficit

im 3km from my exchange, have an attenuation of 45db and my max speed is 6mb with eircom, doesn't stop it slowing to a crawl due to *contention* every evening though :rolleyes:

FatPope

The router is the BT voyager 2110. It's connected directly where the main line comes into the house. I've tried disconnecting everything else but it doesn't make a difference.

I was under the impression that the line rate is the max theoretical rate I could achieve, which is then reduced by attenuation and such to an actual working rate. i.e. if I had paid for 5Mb then the line rate would be listed as 5120Kb but I might see actual rates of a little over 4.

Given that I paid for 7.5Mb I thought I'd see a line rate of 7680Kb but get an actual rate of maybe 6.5 or something. Is this not the case? Am I misunderstanding the meaning of line rate?

As it stands currently I have an attenuation of 42dB and a noise margin of 13.6dB. Putting that into the tool that you guys linked to gives a maximum line connection speed of 7595Kbps and an IP profile of 6.5Mbps

TheDeficit

FatPope wrote: »

The router is the BT voyager 2110. It's connected directly where the main line comes into the house. I've tried disconnecting everything else but it doesn't make a difference.

I was under the impression that the line rate is the max theoretical rate I could achieve, which is then reduced by attenuation and such to an actual working rate. i.e. if I had paid for 5Mb then the line rate would be listed as 5120Kb but I might see actual rates of a little over 4.

Given that I paid for 7.5Mb I thought I'd see a line rate of 7680Kb but get an actual rate of maybe 6.5 or something. Is this not the case? Am I misunderstanding the meaning of line rate?

As it stands currently I have an attenuation of 42dB and a noise margin of 13.6dB. Putting that into the tool that you guys linked to gives a maximum line connection speed of 7595Kbps and an IP profile of 6.5Mbps

call them and let them know, when i was first connected to eircom they set my rate at 4mb and i was reaching a max of 3.5mb when downloading. I didn't even realize this was the case until the guy on the phone said he couldn't understand why they did that and then went and set the speed to 7168, I'm getting an actual max speed of 6mb due to distance from exchange (3km) my attenuation is 45db. Your stats are similar to mine so its worth a shot giving them a call.